Anthony Cave Brown - Journalist

Journalist

Brown began his reporting career in Luton and Bristol before moving to Fleet Street in the mid-1950s where he joined the Daily Mail. During the late 1950s he covered the Hungarian uprising (in 1956) and the Algerian War of Independence. In 1958 he was awarded 'Reporter of the Year'. Brown secured the first Western interview with Egyptian president, Gamel Abdel Nasser, and was a frequent drinking companion of Kim Philby in the Middle East prior to the latter's 1963 defection to the Soviet Union. He also interviewed the dissident Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, who at the time was under surveillance, in 1959. He subsequently smuggled two of Pasternak's poems back to the UK, one of which was immediately published in the Daily Mail.

Brown earned a reputation as an adventurous cutting-edge reporter, but developed something of an extravagant lifestyle, and often left behind large unpaid bills on his foreign trips, according to colleagues. He rode on the first nuclear-powered submarine, and travelled to the South Pole with Sir Vivian Fuchs.

He returned to Britain in 1960 as chief reporter for the Daily Mail, working to uncover corruption in Scotland Yard, and a major espionage case at the Portland naval base.

In 1962, he separated from his wife Caroline Gilliat (daughter of the British filmmaker Sidney Gilliat) and their two small children, Amanda and Toby. The marriage ended in divorce. The daughter, now Amanda Eliasch, ex-wife of Johan Eliasch, is a photographer and has recently published a book on poetry and photography entitled Cloak and Dagger Butterfly, and "British Artists at Work", with Italian Vogue's Franca Sozzani. The son, Toby, is a chairman of a leading hockey club in Wiltshire.

Brown then moved to the United States in 1962, spending a year at Stanford University's Hoover Institute as a visiting fellow. He covered the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and worked in Australia for a television station belonging to Rupert Murdoch. He also worked in Singapore and Malaysia.